Russian ambassador to NATO dismissed the alliance's accusations of Russia inventing a new kind of military operation and applying it in Ukraine

BRUSSELS, March 5. /TASS/. NATO has a long history of "hybrid operations", the Russian ambassador to the North-Atlantic pact, Alexander Grushko said on Thursday as he commented on an inter-parliamentary conference on EU’s common foreign and security policy underway in Riga, Latvia.

One of the top dignitaries who took part in the conference was Alexander Vershbow, a former US Ambassador to Moscow and the incumbent Deputy Secretary General of NATO.

"NATO has an extensive history of hybrid operations," Alexander Grushko said in connection with the frequently heard allegations that Russia was conducting a ‘hybrid war’ of some kind around the crisis in Ukraine - a war in which a skillful use of nonmilitary elements ostensibly augmented a broad array of innovative warfare methods.

"Any country or organization can learn from the alliance’s experience," he said. "We were eyewitnesses of the perfectly well-known signs of a military blackmail, covert interference, supplies of weaponry and defense systems, diplomatic hypocrisy, manipulations with mass media, and explicit misinformation in the former Yugoslavia and in Libya in 2011."

NATO officials habitually cite precisely this set of assets of a hybrid war when they accuse Russia of inventing a new kind of military operation and applying it in Ukraine.